Typographic Treasure Hunt, by Crystal Lin

This is part of a short little series, talking to some of the Shillington graduates involved in The Design Kids' Threesome exhibition. You can see the finished artworks out and about living life on the streets in Surry Hills over the next few days. Crystal Lin studied with us full-time and graduated a couple of weeks ago. She talks about her experience working as a team, paired up with design graduate Lucie Cleuet and typographer Wayne Thompson for this project.

My Threesome experience was amazing.

I know what you're thinking! Just to be clear, my experience designing a typographic poster with contributions from three different designers was amazing. The collaboration was between professional typographer Wayne Thompson, graduate Lucie Cleuet, and myself as a student.

I met up with Lucie Cleuet at the start of the project, as Wayne lives in another city, and we discussed the brief. We had to come up with a typographic poster of a three-word phrase, delegating one word to each designer. Talk about a mission and a half trying to find a phrase that wouldn't leave one designer in the dust with a boring word like "a" or "the"!

Settling on Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, a euphemism for "what the f***" using words from the NATO phonetic alphabet, we dismissed ourselves and started thumbnailing, sending them to each other and throwing ideas around by email.

Email by email, (and with a lot of critiquing and advice from our knowledgeable type master Wayne) we saw our phrase come alive from paper to vectors in Illustrator! As with any design, we ummm'd and ahhh'd over which colours to feature, how would we make it so that one word wouldn't outdo the others. How would we make each word retain its own personality but bring a sense of unity in the overall composition?

We got there in the end.

And finally, we added a subtle camouflage texture to tie in the military use of the NATO alphabet.

Off to the printers it went and onto a window for public viewing. Now, your mission is to hunt out Surry Hills for our poster. Over and out.

Comments: 0

Leave a Comment

Please feel free to comment on this post. Please note that all comments are subject to approval and anything deemed offensive will not be published. Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *